Cruise’s autonomous rideshare vehicles won’t be driving through Dallas streets anytime soon after the San Francisco company announced an “autonomous driving operations pause” to reexamine some of its processes, systems, and tools.
This summer, Cruise leaders announced that Dallas would join Austin, San Francisco, and Phoenix as one of the first places to launch its driverless rideshare technology. The General Motors subsidiary said that its autonomous driverless Chevy Bolts would be bookable via its app in limited locations and hours in Dallas before the end of the year.
In September, Cruise began conducting supervised testing, which means a safety driver was behind the wheel while the vehicles drove autonomously in Oak Lawn, Uptown, Downtown, Deep Ellum, and Lower Greenville neighborhoods. Then, in mid-October, Cruise said the vehicles would begin operating 24/7 without a safety driver while Cruise employees took rides as they prepared to open to the public. But that is all on hold, for now.
The vehicles were banned in California after one of them failed to stop and dragged a pedestrian on October 2. A person was hit by another car and thrown in front of a Cruise vehicle, which stopped but hit the person. Next, in an attempt to pull out of traffic, the vehicle dragged the pedestrian 20 feet, and the person was critically injured after being run over by the vehicle. Cruise recalled nearly 1,000 vehicles from the streets of San Francisco following the incident.
California’s Department of Motor Vehicles revoked Cruise’s license after the accident, and the company announced it was suspending driverless operations nationwide this week. Cruise told federal regulators that a software update would prevent that sort of accident from happening again and enacted a voluntary software recall.
Cruise was drawing fire before the October 2 crash. In September, protestors gathered outside the company’s San Francisco headquarters after the city’s fire department said the company’s vehicles blocked an ambulance from getting to the hospital. The ambulance was carrying a patient who later died. Cruise disputed the claim, and video evidence backed up the company, but there were other complaints about the vehicles blocking traffic, sometimes for hours at a time, according to TechCrunch.
In Dallas-Fort Worth, autonomous vehicles are slowly gaining steam, with most of the focus on last-mile delivery and trucking coming out of Alliance’s Mobility Innovation Zone, which has worked with numerous companies like Kodiak, Aurora, and Clevon to pilot and launch autonomous vehicles that are slowly making their way on the North Texas scene.
In a blog post, Cruise announced that during the pause, the company would be establishing a chief safety officer, appointing a third-party engineering firm to conduct an analysis, having a third-party law firm review the response to the crash, and adopting pillars connected to safety, transparency, and community engagement. “We are dedicated to building a better Cruise, and these initial actions are just some of the steps we’re taking as we listen, learn, and improve. We are committed to keeping our customers, regulators, and the public informed throughout this process,” the post says.
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